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[ Def Leppard UK - Hysteria Album Songs ]
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Phil Collen :: Hysteria Album Our most popular album to date. It was Mutt's idea to make a rock version of "Thriller" - rock songs that were hit singles. We were fortunate enough to have seven strong singles from this record. Mutt Lange was very influential here We seemed to be making a video every few weeks. We were in the top ten all over the world at one time or another. (Phil quote taken from 'Work it Out' UK single postcards).
Women :: 1 "We wanted the 'Hysteria' album to become the blueprint for rock albums in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 'Women' was one of the best songs we came up with for it." - Sav. "As the lead-off track to 'Hysteria' it was crucial. Mutt suggested we write a song about women. We went with his idea and it really worked." - Phil. "Especially memorable for being one of the first songs I worked on after my accident. It helped that it didn't have a frantic tempo. When Phil starts it off live. The place still goes nuts." - Rick. "The video was sent to MTV and purely because of that it began picking up airplay. It was bizarre, because you couldn't buy it as a single - it wasn't one! Like Foreigner's 'Jukebox Hero' It has that low, looping bass. My favourite part is at the end. The modulating key changes as Phil solos away. It's a magical moment that one day you hope your band will find themselves doing." - Joe.
Rocket :: 2 Rick Savage: "The whole point of the lyric in Rocket is a tip of the hat to all the 70's band's whether it be Gary Glitter, Sweet, David Bowie, Queen It was like the feeling that we had when we were 14 and 15 and it was like just being encapsulated in this piece of energy that was all those groups you know."
Animal :: 3 Sav: "It was a guitar riff that Steve and Phil came up with together. We recorded the song with all these guitar parts and then recorded the vocal, which we all thought was one of Joe's best efforts. In fact, the vocal was so good we decided to redo the backing tracks. What eventually happened is that we kept a finished lead vocal and completely rewrote the song underneath that vocal. We had to keep the same chord changes so the vocal would work, but the verses, bridge and chorus were all rewritten. The original version sounded much heavier, but once we heard the style of the lead vocal we thought it would be best to make it more of a pop song." Phil: "Our first top-ten hit in England, and it broke us in Europe. It took about three years to finish recording the song. We kept changing the guitar parts. I used a clean, compressed tone reminiscent of the Fixx." Sav: "I got a lot of satisfaction out of that just because it was nice to have a top ten hit in your home country and it was the lead off single from Hysteria and it just set everything up nice you know. I remember we’d tour England. England was the first place that we actually toured on the Hysteria record and the minute we started the first two bar’s of ‘Animal’ the crowd just lost their minds and it was like Wow this is what it’s like to have hit singles in this country you know, people do respond."
Love Bites :: 4 Phil: “That was written by Mutt. When he first showed it to us, it sounded a bit country-and western. Mutt has always been a big fan of country music. He recently produced his wife's album (Shania Twain's multiplatinum "The Woman in Me"), and it's one of the biggest-selling country releases. For "Love Bites," we just added Def Leppard guitars to it. There was a harmony guitar thing that me and Steve did where we orchestrated the chords. Steve and I jammed the song out with a drum box, and recorded it. The backing track was recorded live, and it ended up on the record. The song went on to become our first and only number-one U.S. Single. “It made my Mum cry. That’s how I knew it was special. It was actually a country and western song when Mutt Lange played his demo to Steve Clark and I. He always loved the Eagles. We goofed around with it quite a lot to Lepparddise it. But it’s essence was kept.”
Joe Elliott: “It was something that Mutt and Steve and Phil worked on, I had really hardly any contribution to the song at all. The only contribution that I can ever acknowledge to was that the chorus was pulled off another song and I kinda help write the other chorus.
It’s the only number one single we’ve ever had in America, it was our first number one single that we've ever had so I mean that kinda made it a little more pleasant for me but at the time it was like ‘I don’t wanna do this song cause I can't!’. But Mutt doesn’t let you get like that
and I’m glad he doesn't he said ‘Look you can do anything you want, if you just maybe don't get it first time you don’t get it first time.”
Pour Some Sugar On Me :: 5 Joe: “Well PSSOM was probably the most important song we’ve ever done because it was totally responsible for kicking Hysteria from big album to extremely big album. I mean it was a so-so hit in England, I think it kinda got to like number 18, it just broke the top twenty. In America it was huge!, I mean it was really, really huge. I remember the record company people telling me like months afterwards when they were checking back over things that song was pretty much responsible for selling 4 million albums in three months which is a phenomenal amount of records. I was working on another song and Mutt, I think it was only me and him in Holland at the time, everybody else was on a break cause I was doing vocals so no point in anyone else being around so they’d go home for a couple of weeks. Mutt had gone for a pee and I picked up the acoustic and started messing around with this thing and he came back in and just asked me what it was probably thinking it was a Stones song or something. And I remember him saying like, ‘This is the best hook I’ve heard for about 5 years’, he said ‘Can we stop doing this’. Cause nobody wanted to do anymore, everybody was exhausted they would never have gone for another song. So basically me and him put a really rough backing track together really quickly in like a few hours and then played it over the phone or a few people came back a few days later and said OK we’ll do it and we did it real quick. It became like one of the most important things we’ve ever done.” Sav: “The Hysteria album was nearly finished. We'd spent almost four years recording it, and were sick of it - we just wanted to get on stage and rock. But then Joe comes up with a rhythm and an image of a song. Mutt knew he had something, and that it could be the biggest song of the Eighties if we did it right. We wanted the song to be a variation of "Rock of Ages." We incorporated some of the rap stuff that was new and popular at the time, but took it a step further and kept it rock and roll.” Phil: “That song was the most representative of the band, and was exactly what we were trying to do. It's easy to get ballads played on the radio, but it's very hard to turn a rock song into a hit. We had to sell five million copies of Hysteria just to break even because we'd spent four years in the studio working on it. We changed producers, did a lot of re-recording, Rick lost his arm. We had so many delays. When the album was finally released, it stopped selling at three million. That might sound blase, but we hadn't made the money back, so we were in debt. Then suddenly, "Pour Some Sugar on Me" was getting played in the Florida strip bars and soon became a strip-joint anthem, and was getting requests on the radio. Before we knew it, Hysteria had jumped back up the charts.”
Armageddon It :: 6 Sav: “The song has a loose, lazy rock and roll feel. I came up with an idea of a verse that was in the vein of "Rock of Ages," and that inspired the song. But the beat sounded so square we ended up changing the entire guitar part. Then we came up with an idea for a chorus, but we had no idea what the lyric should be. All we had was the line, "Gimme all of your lovin'." We knew the melody should be like that, but we didn't want to use those lyrics because we wanted something that said a bit more. Try as we could, we could not come up with anything that sounded better. Then Mutt finally said, "This sounds good, leave it the way it is." And it worked.” Phil: “A fun song to do live. It's kind of like T. Rex's "Bang a Gong." A good party song. It never gets boring to play and it translates well to acoustic.” Joe: “Armageddon it was the last one. Mutt and I were only ones in the studio. And as soon as I finished doing the last bit of that song, it wasn’t so much a feeling of anti-climax as it was an inner sense of being totally relieved. I didn’t jump up and down. We didn’t hug each other and drink tons of champagne. It was more like ‘Oh we’re finished, man. This is great.’ We shook hands, sat down, looked at each other and we both let out a big sigh.” Joe: “Armageddon It and Sugar were pretty much written close together and it was very Bolan influenced you know we used to listen to T Rex all the time and when you’ve got songs like Get It On which is basically what that song is based on and it’s very like Get It On and you hear Marc Bolan singing ‘She’s got a Hubcap Diamond Star Halo' which doesn’t make any sense but sounds very cool.” Sav: “He basically wrote the new book on lyrics that don’t necessarily have to have a meaning as long as they sound good within the context of the song, and we tried to pick up on that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a story, it doesn’t necessarily have to have a specific meaning like a lot of our songs. We literally wrote because the lyric or the syllable made the song sound good the voice was an instrument when we were recording a lot of those songs.”
Hysteria :: 10 Sav: “We’d gotten so far with the recording and writing of Hysteria and we thought that we needed about three more songs. We were looking for more straight-ahead rock songs and we all went away for a weekend and I got together with Phil the guitar player and I played him the opening riff for Hysteria. I said ‘Look it’s an idea I’ve had for a few months now I mean I know it’s not what we’re looking for but let’s see what we can develop, and he had another part of the song which became bridge of Hysteria and we put the two together and all of a sudden he started coming up with melodies for the verses and the bridge and it happened very quickly and within the space of about two hours we’d got most of the song done. We just needed a chorus and we said look leave it ‘till Monday cause we’ve got the germ of a good song here but we don’t know whether it’s appropriate we don’t know whether it’s what we need right now let’s play it to the rest of the guys on Monday. The guys came in Monday morning and everybody loved it and it was like Wow this could be really big.” Joe: “It was like a complete team effort.” Sav: “Yeah, this was one of the few examples of just the way that it worked out that splitting up the song became people’s individual ideas that worked together.” Sav: “We all decided to take a weekend off and try and write a commercial rock song. I came up with something, and it became the main riff to the song. Phil thought it was great and he came up with the bridge and sang it to me. We took out some acoustic guitars and played it for some friends. The following Monday, we went back to the studio and everyone was blown away, even though it wasn't the type of song we wanted. Stringed instruments can set a mood, and we wanted to do the same thing but do it on guitar. We didn't want to cop out and do a keyboard thing so we got into using E-bows and orchestrating sustained notes with harmonies. It gave that orchestral sound to the guitars.”
Excitable :: 11 Sav: About hearing a song in a bar in Dublin; Sav recalls, "there were a lot of good songs coming over the disco. One of them was the Michael Jackson - Mick Jagger song ‘State of Shock’. It just had a great groove from start to finish, no real musical changes, and we all got to thinking how neat it would be to have a song like that on the album.
"The next morning, I got up and started messing around with my guitar. Within ten minutes, I had this groove. I asked Mutt what he thought - the actual riff only lasted about six seconds - and he said ‘Let’s tape it.’ We made a ten-minute tape of the riff, played it back and Mutt started singing melodies over it. That was it."
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